All That Jazz

Danny Cassidy has taken a major step towards clinching his theory that jazz comes from Donegal.

It will be recalled that Cassidy has claimed that “jazz” derived from the Donegal Irish word “teas” – pronounced with a soft fricative t, "cheas” – meaning heat, excitement, vigour.
Rendered as “jazz”, he suggested, it had been introduced into formal language by Irish sports journalist “Scoop” Gleeson, writing about baseball in the San Francisco Bulletin early in 1913. It had then speedily transmigrated into music coverage to refer to the new sounds beginning to emerge to reflect the rhythm and feel of a rowdy new way of living.
Cassidy has established through census records that there was a sizable population of Irish-speaking immigrants and their first-generation descendants living in SF at the time.
So far so plausible, as a starting point for a theory. But who was to say that Gleeson’s use of the word in the Bulletin was original? Maybe he’d picked it up from a previous printed version with a source far removed from possible association with Donegal Irish.
Now comes solid support for the first prop of the Cassidy theory.
This is from the front page of the SF Bulletin, April 19, 1913. Worth reading through to the end. Jimmy Breslin and a couple of others apart, they don’t write them like this any more.
In Praise of “Jazz” – A Futurist Word Which Has Just Joined the Language. By Ernest Hopkins
This column is entitled What’s Not in the News but occasionally a few things that are in the news leak in. We have been trying for some time to keep these things out, but hereby acknowledge ourselves powerless and surrender.
This thing is a word. It has recently become current in the Bulletin office…
This word is…"Jaz“. It is also spelt “Jazz…”
This remarkable and satisfactory-sounding word means something like life, vigor, energy, effervescence of spirit, joy, pep, magnetism, verve, virility, ebulliency, courage, happiness, – oh, what’s the use? – jaz.
Nothing else can express it.
It is “jazz” when you run for your train; “jaz” when you soak an umpire; “jazz” when you demand a raise; “jaz” when you hike thirty-five miles of a Sunday; “jazz” when you simply sit around and beam so that all who look beam on you. Anything that takes manliness or effort or energy or activity or strength of soul is “jaz.”
We would not have you apprehend that this new word is slang. It is merely futurist language, which as everybody knows is more than mere cartooning.
“Jazz” is a nice word, a classic word, easy on the tongue and pleasant to the ears, profoundly expressive of the idea it conveys – as when you say a home-run hitter is “full of the old jaz.” (Credit Scoop.) There is and always has been an art of genial strength; to this art we now give the splendid title of “jazz".
The sheer musical quality of the word, that delightful sound like the crackling of an electric spark, commends it. It belongs to the class of onomatopoeia. It was important that this vacancy in our language should have been filled with a word of proper sound, because “jaz” is a quality often celebrated in epic poetry, in prizefight stories, in the tale of action or the meditative sonnet; it is a universal word, and must appear well in all society.
That is why “pep”, which tried to mean the same but never could, failed; it was a rough-neck from the first, and could not wear evening clothes. “Jazz” is at home in bar or ballroom; it is a true American."
This seems to be the first celebration of “jazz” as the distinctive sound of the American 20th century as it reached adolescence.
And they maybe got it from Gortahork.
More anon.

First there was the Hamilton Report, which revealed that gangster businessmen and senior ministers had stolen tens of millions of tax-payers’ money via beef export scams. Hamilton was hailed as hero.
The gangster businessmen are still making a mint. The most senior politician – since retired from politics, immensely rich – is regularly interviewed as a wise statesman with much of value to say on all manner of topics. Hamilton was made Chief Justice within weeks of the report’s publication.
Raise this question now and you’ll be told that it’s all in the past, there are more pressing issues to be faced.
That set a pattern that we should keep in mind as scandal tumbles out after scandal from the proceedings of the Morris Tribunal into garda corruption in Donegal, and commentators hail Morris as a hero.
Here’s a question: Would Morris have taken more seriously an allegation against a senior legal figure in relation to gravely serious garda misbehaviour if the legal figure in question had not in the interim joined himself on the bench?
When will it become permissible to raise this question in the mainstream media?
When it’s all in the past and there are more pressing issues to be faced.
Great system, isn’t it?
And isn’t Judge Morris the great man?

I see that that odious creature Condoleezza Rice has been in Egypt blathering about her boss Bush’s commitment to democracy in the region.
Why, Rice told CNN, hadn’t the president’s own wife been to Egypt to reinforce the Bush administration’s pledge to back “democracy and development”?
True enough. Ms. Bush had welcomed plans by dictator Honsi Mubarak to allow two candidates – rather than one, himself – to contest the upcoming presidential election. Both candidates, mind you, will have to be approved in advance by Honsi’s regime.
It is widely anticipated that the Honsi-approved anti-Honsi candidate later this year will be Gamal Mubarak, who has been suggesting for some months that he’s a tad frustrated with the pace of dad’s reform programme.
During a photo-call at Um-Al-Qura school in Alexandria, Ms. Bush hailed the two-candidate plan as a “bold and wise” initiative. Readers may have seen a clip of this happy occasion – the First Lady chatting animatedly with teachers and pupils, all of whom seemed serenely well-pleased with the state of affairs in their country and eagerly looking forward to exercising their democratic franchise.
What you may not have seen was local MP Hamdi Hassan demanding an investigation into claims that, prior to the First Lady’s arrival at Um-Al-Qura, officials of the regime had rounded up the entire staff and student body and replaced them with an entirely different staff and student body, “in order to perform their own show in front of Mrs. Bush.”
Says Mr. Hassan: “It seems that the appearance of the school’s original administrators and students would not have been appreciated by the First Lady, as she would have seen poor faces suffering malnutrition.”
And no mention that I could see in coverage of either the Bush or Rice visits of the Mubarak regime’s role in the “rendition” by US operatives to Egyptian jails of suspected terrorists so that information might be extracted from them by means which wouldn’t pass muster in more squeamish jurisdictions.
Thus does the struggle for democracy proceed.
I’m off to Edinburgh and Gleneagles to check on progress. Maybe see some of you there…